Senior Java Engineer - Core/Infra - Elasticsearch

About the Role

Elastic is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch team and focus on ensuring that the shared platform functionalities of Elasticsearch are easy to use, performant, maintainable, and secure.

The team's mission is to create foundational infrastructure and shared functionality that enables engineers to develop, extend, and support Elasticsearch. The team owns common functionality such as services, settings, and scripting, and makes Elasticsearch extensible through plugins or the Painless scripting language. The team also makes Elasticsearch observable by providing logging and telemetry information, owns the orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless, CI/CD workflows, and enables delivery across serverless, cloud, and on-premise environments.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure underpinning Elasticsearch.
• Make Elasticsearch developers more productive by identifying and developing automation opportunities and integrating agentic apps into workflows.
• Design and implement new horizontally-scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch.
• Solve difficult issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and propose solutions.
• Improve operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
• Collaborate in the open with the Elasticsearch team, Elastic users, and supporting open-source projects.
• Support support engineers with complex technical problems.
• Own operational investigations end-to-end until performance or stability issues are successfully resolved.

Requirements

• Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through trade-offs.
• Proficiency in algorithms and data structures.
• Strong skills in core Java, standard data structure libraries, concurrency constructs, and newer language features.
• Experience with low-level Java concepts such as concurrency, parallelism, and classloaders.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (e.g., Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps).
• Experience leading large-scale projects across engineering teams.
• Proven track record of leveraging AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code while owning final outcomes.
• Ability to own projects from technical design through development.
• Ability to work autonomously and drive decisions in a distributed team using asynchronous communication.

Preferred Qualifications

• Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etc.
• Experience with observability and telemetry solutions, particularly OpenTelemetry.
• Knowledge of Go.
• Knowledge of containers and Kubernetes.
• Knowledge of Java build tools (Gradle, Maven), with a strong preference for Gradle.
• Experience working on a platform or developer productivity team.